I got a visit a few years ago from a serious researcher from a major American university who was doing a study on the privatization of Piraeus port. He insisted, somewhat monotonously, on asking: “Why did you give it to China?” And my simple answer was, “Because no one else really wanted it when the tender was launched.” It was nothing short of the truth.
For a very long time, neither the Americans nor the Europeans paid much attention to ports and other infrastructure that changed hands and left the control of the West.
As prime minister of Greece, Antonis Samaras made calls to his European counterparts and American officials urging them to take part in the country’s privatization tenders. All he got from them was indifference and excuses like “We’re not like the Chinese; if a company decides that it’s in its shareholders’ best interest to do so, it will make a bid.” Even the former president of France, Francois Hollande, told me that during Greece’s economic crisis he had tried to convince his counterparts that putting too much pressure on the country would force it to sell its infrastructure and that many of them were at risk of falling into non-Western hands. No one took him seriously and no one did anything to prevent that from happening.
Things have changed today – a lot – in Europe but mainly in the United States. The only thing that the Democrats and Republicans agree on is the need to take a hard line with Beijing. The Trump government has named China as Enemy Number One for the US and instructed its diplomatic missions accordingly.
Greece is likely to come face-to-face with some hard dilemmas that it did not have to deal with 20 years ago. It was easier back then to pursue a multidimensional policy because it was the age of globalization and China was still playing nice. It has started playing hardball in recent years, however, exerting significant pressure, including on Athens. From which 5G system Greece would use to, of course, the port of Piraeus, the dilemmas have become more tangible and will become even tougher in the years ahead because Trump’s people have no regard for tact when it comes to such matters.
China, on the other hand, wants to win over Europe and to pull it away from the US, if it can – and it is prepared to exploit the American president’s blunt stance toward Europe in other to achieve this. Often referred to as the “head of the dragon,” meaning that it is a strategic gateway for China-EU relations, Greece is key to Chinese interests. We need to brace ourselves, therefore, for the new cold war that is erupting and for turbulence that may seem to concern two superpowers located thousands of miles away from us, but which are, in actual fact, in a position to set us against some very real and very difficult dilemmas.